Peter Eckersley

Peter Eckersley

Chief Computer Scientist

Peter Eckersley is Chief Computer Scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He leads a team of technologists who watch for technologies that, by accident or design, pose a risk to computer users' freedoms—and then look for ways to fix them. They write code to make the Internet more secure, more open, and safer against surveillance and censorship. They explain gadgets to lawyers and policymakers, and law and policy to gadgets.

Peter is currently focused on a new EFF initiative on the policy, strategy and governance questions raised by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies: how fast are they progressing? What are their security and privacy implications? What policies should governments adopt now, and what will we need to do in the longer term to ensure AI develops in a way that is safe and meets human needs?

Deeplinks Posts by Peter

One of the most debated items in the launch version of our Secure Messaging Scorecard is whether communications via Skype are end-to-end encrypted, so that the provider (which is currently Microsoft) can't access them.
In preparing the scorecard, Skype was a hard case for us. In its early...

EFF recently began a new Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto, with the aim of encouraging the creation and use of tools and protocols that not only offer genuinely secure messaging, but are also usable in practice by the humans who are most vulnerable to dangerous surveillance, including those who...

EFF has a long running-mission to Encrypt the Web. To make the Web more secure, more private, and more censorship-resistant, we need to completely replace the insecure HTTP protocol with HTTPS. That task saw some major progress last week, with the anouncement by CloudFlare that it will now ...

Facebook expanded its ever-growing advertising and tracking reach this week with new integration between the giant social network and Atlas, an advertising platform it purchased from Microsoft. The company now lets advertisers target you across all of your devices and on participating websites, based on characteristics from your Facebook...

Good security practices require us to use different passwords for most or all of the websites and services we interact with. For accounts of any significance, those also need to be strong passwords of one form or another. But if you combine those two requirements (one password per...

Yesterday, ProPublica reported on new research by a team at KU Leuven and Princeton on canvas fingerprinting. One of the most intrusive users of the technology is a company called AddThis, who are employing it in “shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.”...

Do you own an Android device? Is it less than three years old? If so, then when your phone’s screen is off and it’s not connected to a Wi-Fi network, there's a high risk that it is broadcasting your location history to anyone within Wi-Fi range that wants to listen.
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EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today: Privacy Badger is EFF's answer to intrusive and...